Gustave Flaubert
1821–80

Gustave Flaubert, novelist, was born in Rouen on 12 December 1821. After long hesitation between medicine and literature, he chose literature, beginning with poetry, which erelong he gave up for prose. Flaubert’s life was extremely uneventful; in his youth some obscure form of brain disease to some extent arrested his youthful development. He was a very late producer, and his work, when it did appear, was marked by a strong and morbid idiosyncrasy. Madame Bovary (1857) is the painful but powerful story of an unhappily married woman who lapses into vice and dies by suicide. His second work, Salammbô (1862), dealt with the last struggle of Rome and Carthage, and is rather overweighted by archaeological detail. L’Éducation Sentimentale (1869) was far less popular. In 1874 appeared the splendid phantasmagoria of La Tentation de St. Antoine, a masterpiece of its kind. Le Candidat (1874), a play of no merit, had little success. Trois Contes (1877) is admirable. Flaubert died at Rouen on 9 May 1880; after his death appeared a novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, which had not received his final revision. His correspondence with George Sand was published in 1884.